£17m kicked in touch

Council Survey by Jim Williams

IF Oldham Council was a football club (and no jokes about Howard Sykes being centre forward, please) spending £45 million a year on wages, you might expect them to be in the Premiership.

In fact, they’re in the Oldham Sunday League and the new manager and his backroom staff have to get them out of there pretty damn quick.

Local politics is not unlike football. There’s no shortage of pushing and shoving, plenty of insults, lots of ducking and diving and more than a few own goals. Fortunately there’s no spitting and not much swearing.

And what we had last night was a sort of half-time pep talk with captain Howard Sykes admitting the team was in a mess and sounding as though he wished he could say something stronger but didn’t want a yellow card.

He promised a 2.5 per cent council tax rise next year and then came over all gushing rhetoric: “leaner, meaner, creative, responsive” followed by a quick burst of “cleaner, greener safer”. Maybe he’s spending too much time watching the ads on telly.

Howard said that the council had to persuade the citizens of Oldham that the council was on their side and not just spending their money. He has a job on his hands there but with Charlie playing striker, midfield general, stopper and goalie, anything is possible.

“We are where we are,” said Howard (as if we didn’t know, I’d rather have been sat in front of the fire at home, but there you go) “there will be job losses, many hundreds and that is not what I came into politics for,” he added.

We all know that we are £17 million in debt which would be enough to drive us to drink if it wasn’t nearly against the law, but how did it happen? How could we with all these officers and experts get ourselves in such a mess?

Labour group leader Jim McMahon was pondering the same imponderable from the subs bench. “We have all these highly paid officers who said our last budget was deliverable,” said Jim, “but now they say it’s not.

He said that instead of throwing bricks at one another (quite a Christmas spectacle that would have been), they should pull together not pull apart because the people of Oldham were fed up with it. It was good stuff from Jim, looking and sounding every inch the leader.

With £17 million missing from your pocket and the bills to pay, it’s no wonder money or the lack of it was on everyone’s mind and the chief holder of the purse strings Lynne Thompson was in good Miss Whiplash mode, telling us all we must “ tighten our belts VERY HARD”. But did she have a sore throat or were those husky tones a tease?

There was a little side-show to last night’s meeting, no doubt inspired by Charlie. Senior officers of the council — you know the ones with the holiday homes in the Bahamas — sat on a bench behind a card bearing their names and looking for all the world like a losing “University Challenge” team. Where they there, on public show, because they know all the answers or because they don’t?

The splendid Ann Wingate had us going all bottoms up and there is something slightly risqué about the word “bottoms” in Ann’s cultured tones. What Ann wants is for us to join a citizens’ panel coming up with brilliant ideas to change the world. We then pass the ideas on to the council (does black hole come to mind?) who in turn move it on to the Local Government Association who then pass it to the Government.

What happens after that is anyone’s guess. But to Ann it means that instead of being top down, it will all be bottom up.

Dave Hibbert said he was glad that the Lib-Dems were standing on his shoulders ( he means nicking his ideas) with weekly refuse collections but Howard Sykes pointed out that if he stood on anyone’s shoulders it would be someone taller than diminutive Dave. In fact if Howard stood on Dave, I suspect there’d be nothing left above ground of the Labour champion.

The Mayor, Shoab Akhtar, is doing a great job. He has a delicious sense of humour and genuinely enjoys refereeing a match where no-one seems to know the rules.

When Jim McCardle tried to move forward a plan that will see good performing taxi firms able to have four stars on their cars, only to be halted by a string of points of order, accepted an amendment and then had to accept an amendment to the amendment, the mayor nearly fell of his chair laughing.

In the end the taxi drivers got their stars but the council has a long way to go before it gets its promotion to the big league.